Talk:Picture book

(old) Images
ironic that we have no images as examples — Preceding unsigned comment added by Matthew (talk • contribs) 12:26, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
 * By the way there have been copyright problems with images here. See /Archive 1 and "View history". --P64 (talk) 19:26, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

Development And Evolution Of The Picturebook
I added this entire section, from chapter 1 of my book. I can't quite determine how to allow this material to be used on wikipedia (since I'm the author, own the copyright, one would think it's okay to post the material for public consumption), so, rather than spend time to insert all of the references, will wait for the discussion to find me. Stan Zielinski, Author, Childrens Picturebook Price Guide 04:32, 4 March 2007 (UTC)
 * 2012. Much of that material was two years later, after more than a hundred intervening edits. Interested editors should consult the 4 March 2007 insertion of 33,000 bytes "from chapter 1 of my book" by Stan Zielinski,
 * --P64 (talk) 19:26, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

International History of Picturebook?
This is only the history of the Picturebook in English/USAmerican literature! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.50.48.250 (talk • contribs) 16:36, 25 March 2007‎ (UTC)

Excised from the article
I'm removing some text from the article and pasting them here for future reference and possible summary. The version right before I started removing, for better context:.

Some of the below is WP:OR, trivia or only tangentially related to the subject:

The below I removed due to questionable notability:

Beginning in 1930 Platt & Munk published the "Never Grow Old Series" of children's picture books. The nine book series included retellings of several Mother Goose stories, and also included a new edition of Helen Bannerman's Little Black Sambo, this time illustrated by Eulalie Banks.

Those in the below list who are not already mentioned in the text should probably be worked in.

- Notable illustrators


 * Ludwig Bemelmans
 * Jan Brett
 * Virginia Lee Burton
 * Randolph Caldecott
 * Eric Carle
 * Walter Crane
 * Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire
 * Tomie dePaola


 * Wanda Gag
 * Kate Greenaway
 * Clement Hurd
 * Ezra Jack Keats
 * Mercer Mayer
 * Robert McCloskey
 * David McKee
 * Rose O'Neill
 * Chris Raschka


 * H. A. Rey
 * Maurice Sendak
 * Peter Spier
 * William Steig
 * Dr. Seuss
 * Chris Van Allsburg
 * Robert Munsch

The notion of books specifically for children was rare during the mid-19th century. Books for entertainment or enjoyment were especially rare. The books that were made for children, by and large, were religious or educational in nature. The idea that children could be entertained by what they read was relatively novel.

The early reader series exploded in popularity during the late 1930s and early 1940s.

In 2001, The Little Engine That Could stood 30th on Publisher Weekly's list of the top bestselling children's hardcover books.

The early success of the "I Can Read" books and the Beginner Books, both from a commercial and learn-to-read perspective, initiated the blurring between educational and entertainment books.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, illustrated children's picture books were not economically feasible or accessible to a majority of the population, so the books were produced and marketed to a minority of relatively affluent families. Children's literacy was more the exception than the rule, since children were critical providers of labor to both the agrarian and industrial economies. Therefore education, by and large, was considered of secondary importance. Books specifically produced for the entertainment of children were rare, as the industry of children's literature was quite immature. The methods, quality, and economics of multi-color printing technologies were not cost effective for mass market picture books.

So, from the artist's perspective, the attention to those relatively few pages were quite high, and the examples are often exquisite.

Therefore, in 1938, a highly creditable organization began presenting an award annually to a book and illustrator, lending great credence to the blossoming art form.

Interestingly, in the decade leading up to the first Caldecott Awards, three of Wanda Gág's picture books won Newbery awards for their literary merit, probably hastening the inception of an annual award for children's illustration. The Caldecott Awards continue to be presented today, and have grown in stature and prestige over the past 70 years.

The first twelve books were all published simultaneously, in hard cover format with dust jackets. At a price of 25 cents, the series was met with instant commercial success.

The books went into multiple printings nearly immediately, devoured by a population hungry for a children's book of this sort. Inexpensive, yet of high quality and high durability, the Little Golden Books fulfilled an unmet need of the country's growing juvenile reading population. From a parent's perspective, LGB's were a worthy economic alternative to the comic book.

Many book collectors do not realize that the first thirty-five LGB's were issued with dust jackets &mdash; from 1942 to 1947 &mdash; at a standard 25-cent price. These dust jacketed versions also have a blue cloth spine. There is an active collecting community of first edition Little Golden Books. Collecting Little Golden Books (Krause Publications), by Steve Santi, is the authoritative price guide. Online auctions for first printings are especially competitive. High quality and high demand, coupled with very limited supply, begets high prices.

Each of these books was commercially successful, and Seuss and his children's books became nationally popular. Life Magazine featured an article on Seuss in the Dec. 15, 1941 issue, and Newsweek published an article on Dr. Seuss creations in the February 9 1942 issue. WWII served as a break in Seuss's book career, then

Look Magazine published a feature article on Seuss in the June 7, 1938 issue, titled “On Unheard of Animals," an article about some of his crazy animal creations.

The Cat In The Hat is a tremendously important book. Not just an important picture book or an important children's book, but an important book without any qualifiers! The publication of the book in 1957 forever changed the way in which children would learn to read and be educated. Reading COULD be fun!

Prior to the publication of his first children's book in 1937, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (Random House, 1937)), Theodor Seuss Geisel was a prominent and successful humorist illustrator for such magazines as Judge and Life. By the time of The Cat In The Hat's publication, Dr. Seuss was a very successful children's book illustrator, having published twelve children's books, three of which had won Caldecott Honor awards. Actually, prior to the publication of The Cat In The Hat, one could easily say that Dr. Seuss had already had two successful illustration careers, one as a humorist and one as a picture book creator.

Successful before the publication of the The Cat In The Hat, after its publication, Dr. Seuss became an 'overnight' national phenomenon. After the publication of The Cat In The Hat, numerous feature articles were published in Life, Look and other prominent periodicals. The book's characters, along with other Seuss creations, were extended into toys and other products, occurring long before co-merchandising and line extensions became commonplace for children's character marketing.

While pictures are iconic representations, resembling in some way the objects they depict, words are arbitrary signs, with no actual resemblance to the things they refer to. As a result, words and pictures convey different kinds of information, and the words and the pictures in a picture book communicate different aspects of the stories they tell together. They tend then to have an ironic relationship to each other--one tells or shows what the other is silent about. Competent illustrators often use these differences to create surprisingly complex stories out of relatively simple texts. Commentators have suggested a range of ways in which illustrators use aspects of pictorial representation to add complex information about the characters and situations outlined by the simple verbal texts of picture books: the size, shape, color and position of visual objects both on the two-dimensional plane of a picture and in the three-dimensional space it implies; the cultural and symbolic implications of the visual objects depicted;  the use of a repertoire of visual styles to express specific attitudes towards the subjects being depicted; the relationship of the pictures to each other.

, especially after Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which dramatically increased the percentage of children able to attend school.

Rather, a combination of elements came together to start the children's picture book industry: Compulsory education, children's literature, printing technology, and child labor laws.

- =Compulsory education- = In 1852, Massachusetts was the first state to mandate a public education requirement for children. Over the next sixty years, compulsory education spread across the states, until finally in 1918, Mississippi became the last state to pass similar legislation. Obviously, this spurred the start of a major transition within the United States: from a country with a majority of illiterate children to a country with a majority of literate children.

Still, mandated schooling was not rigorously enforced, and truancy was endemic across the country. Juvenile literacy was still the exception. Children were considered to be part of the working class, and, for all but the rich, an underlying foundation to the agrarian and industrialized economies. Children did not fully leave the work force until 1936, when the Fair Labor Act resulted in children entering schools in large numbers.

- - Child labor- - In 1938, the United States Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, making it illegal for children under 14 years of age to work full time. Although education had been mandated on a state-by-state basis beginning in 1852, the economic benefits of working children had kept the public from wholeheartedly embracing truancy laws.

The Fair Labor Standards Act was enforced at a federal level, and caused a large number of school age children to leave the workplace and enter school. In turn, the number of formally educated children increased the quantity and variety of beginning reader books. Beginning reader books nearly always included clarifying or instructive pictures. As more children became literate, the demand for entertainment books increased, and the result was a step change increase in the capitalistic forces to create picture books for the market.

So, leading up 1920, the following socio-economic threads were coming together:


 * More and more children were becoming literate, as the country had a sixty year history with compulsory education; the last state mandate was passed in 1918.
 * Children's literature had become accepted, blossoming in the late 19th century and early part of the 20th century, and it was not unusual for publishers to target juvenile readers.
 * Advancement in lithography technologies caused step–change reductions in the cost of printing. As rotary presses proliferated around the country, industry pressure was increased to find economically viable publishing content.
 * Advancement in lithography technologies made it easier for artists to create high quality mass produced images, as a complex technique (etching) was removed from the publishing process.

The combination of social, technical, and economic elements came together in the mid– and late–1920s and the children's picture book industry was born.

- =Printing technology—offset lithography- = Perhaps the largest impact on the development of the picture book was the advancement in printing technology, which made tremendous progress in the late 19th century and early part of the 20th century. In particular, the technology for offset lithography made high quality color printing economical to use for mass produced books.

It is important to understand a little of the process of lithography, since it will lead the reader to a higher appreciation for picture books by illustrators of the 1920s and 1930s, the era in which the technology was fast developing. In addition, the advancements in lithography play a very important role in the picture book industry today.

Prior to the advent of lithography, gravure was the principal method of producing a high quality image to paper. Gravure is the process of engraving the image onto a metal or wood plate, applying ink to the engraving, then transferring the image to paper by impression. The engraving process was tedious, labor intensive, and not very conducive to correction. A lot of skill and technique was required to create the engraving, and the illustrator by necessity was highly connected to the engraving process.

Compared to gravure, lithography is much simpler to execute. Originally, lithography was simply drawing onto a stone using a waxy substance. The stone was then wet, and when an oily ink mixture was applied, it would adhere to the wax and repel from the wet stone areas. Pressing paper to the stone would then transfer the image to paper. In this way, etching an image into metal or wood was no longer required. This greatly economized the process of lithography over gravure, in terms of time, labor, and materials. The economics for producing illustrations in books was greatly improved.

In order to do multiple colors using lithography, multiple stones would be used, one for each color. On each stone an image needs to be created, each image particular to a particular color. For example, one image would be made just for blue ink, another for just the red ink, and so forth. Then, ink of a particular color is applied to each stone image, and the paper is pressed in steps. In this way, each step applies a color. When one speaks of a four-color press, then the steps might be red, blue, green and black.

Originally, with lithography, the illustrator would draw directly onto flat stones. Over time, methods were created which allowed the illustrations to be drawn onto special paper, which could be transferred onto the stones. During the course of the 19th century, these lithographic stones were gradually replaced with metal plates, in which the image was made via a photographic process. These plates were less expensive and easier to work with, and evolved into the use of curved plates. Curved plates allowed for rotary presses, which greatly increased the economies of books printed by lithographic techniques. By the turn of the 20th century, rotary lithographic presses were becoming more and more common.

Better performing inks and color evolved in conjunction with the developments in the lithographic press. The ink's "magic" was in adhering to the paper and not to the impressioning device. The science of lithographic ink greatly improved the quality and economics of illustrations in print.

This phenomenon favorably impacted the consumer market for children's books. The economic forces that percolate early reader books to market became more formalized, forming a business infrastructure for the picture book industry. As a result, more and more illustrators could begin to economically support themselves by illustrating children's picture books.

By the 1970s, printing technology had evolved so much that the illustrator became less and less involved with the printing(haha) process. The advent of photography to create negatives for lithographic printing meant that the illustrator could focus on their medium of expression, rather than on the techniques necessary to get the image onto a press. Today's illustrators do not have to be involved in the color separation process, although some choose to do so.

- =Involved parents- = Still, up until the 1970s, the educational selection of books was in large part the business of the ALA librarians and the country's educators, since these organizations largely controlled the books our children were formally exposed to in schools. This changed beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as credible journalists and educators went public with scathing exposes and rebuttals of the shortcomings and failures of our public education system, forever changing the laissez-faire attitude of parental involvement in their child's elementary education. Parents began becoming more connected to the educational development of their children, which fueled a greater involvement in what their children were reading.

This social unrest toward public education was in part why the U.S. Secretary of Education created the National Commission on Excellence in Education in 1981, and directed it to present a report on the quality of education in America for him and the American people. The Commission's report, published in April1983, was titled "Our Nation At Risk."

"'Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. This report is concerned with only one of the many causes and dimensions of the problem, but it is the one that under girds American prosperity, security, and civility. We report to the American people that while we can take justifiable pride in what our schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well-being of its people, the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur—others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.'"

In response to "Our Nation At Risk," a measure of books, newspaper and journal articles were published in the mid- and late- eighties, both citing, supporting, and countering the findings of the commission (and continue to be published today). It is our opinion that a by-product of this mass of social dialogue was a shift within the group of informed and concerned parents, away from total dependency on the public school system, and toward joint responsibility for the education of our children. This shift is still in process and has created a social group we refer to as the involved parent.

Today's involved parent, in this modern era of illustrated children's picture books, is motivated to not only read to their children to improve their reading and language skills, but is highly participative in the selection of the particular books. This pervasive participation is increasing variety and diversity of the demand. It is also improving quality, since the competition for the readers' eyes and minds is fierce among publishers, and they realize quality begets sales. So there is improved quality of the word, obviously, and also improved quality of the illustration, since writers understand that good composition, storyboarding, and pictures help tell and sell the stories.

The 'primary reader books', such as the Dick and Jane series, has almost entirely vanished from our elementary school curriculum. Instead, it has been replaced by commercially produced early reader books, typified by the Beginner Book series. The beginning reader books now used in the elementary school system must both educate and entertain. No longer is the selection of the early reader books wholly the responsibility of the educational administration across the country.

- Purpose- Although generally picture books are generally considered to be the best literature for young children there has been some debate as to the actual purpose for them. Perry Nodelman in his book "Words About Pictures," as will as many others have pointed out that pictures are not automatically understood. The cultural researcher Deregowski for example found that people without formal schooling where unable to see many of the illusionary and perspective effects present in pictures. The young children that read most picture books then do not understand many of the things that are happening in the pictures.

Of further concern as Nodelman pointed out is the fact that pictures can actually make it more difficult for children to read, as they try to interpret the words based on the picture.

The function of pictures in young children's literature is more an attempt to make the book more interesting rather than a means by which children can learn to read. Pictures also serve as a means by which children can learn to understand many different forms of art. As different picture books are illustrated in many differing styles they can help to teach children to understand these different forms of art. This understanding is important in our highly visual society which uses graphics and graphs form many different forms of communication. Just as important the visual appreciation that comes from picture books can help to bring greater joy to children as they grow and are able to appreciate the art in the world around them.

Siawase (talk) 13:52, 5 July 2009 (UTC)


 * 2012. This section was composed in a series of 17 edits primarily by piecemeal import of non-consecutive content from the article. Because it is piecemeal, the hidden text is not useful (not very). Instead interested editors should consult


 * 1) (copied from the top of this section) "The version right before I started removing, for better context: ."
 * 2) 4 March 2007 insertion of 33,000 bytes "from chapter 1 of my book" by Stan Zielinski
 * --P64 (talk) 19:26, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

Removing OR and globalize templates
I removed the original research and globalize templates. I think I managed to remove all the obvious OR, but some tone issues may remain. The American material is still dominating, but is now balanced by other sections, though the Asian/Australian section needs more expanding (not to mention other regions.) Siawase (talk) 13:51, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

Picture books for Adults
This article only seems to discuss children's picture books. These books: Dragon of Heaven, Go the Fuck to Sleep, Winds trilogy, Storm trilogy and Mage Wars trilogy are all picture books for adults. I'm sure there are more picture books geared at adults. We do have a mention about picture books for teens however books like Go the Fuck to Sleep are in no way intended for teens however they are still picture books. Can we discuss the difference between adult picture books and children's, it not always 'adult' content the Lackey are often more incomprehensible to children then inappropriate. We should discuss the difference between adult and children's picture books and how pictures can be used to enhance a story for both young and old in more depth.

Tydoni (talk) 01:24, 25 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Perhaps the International and Adults concerns should be addressed in a different way, with a main article or three on "Children's picture books", "British and American picture books", "History of British and American picture books", etc.
 * Furthermore, it doesn't matter whether or not "books like Go the Fuck to Sleep" are intended for teens, because picture books for teens also need distinction, not coverage as generic picture books. ... -P64

What is a picture book?
Is every book with illustrations a picture book? No.

Anyone thinking about the scope of this article should consider: when it is "finished" which book articles and illustrator biographies should include "picture book(s)" bluelinks? --P64 (talk) 19:44, 15 July 2012 (UTC)


 * Working on the British Kate Greenaway Medal, somewhere in the official coverage I have redd the point that the American Caldecott Medal recognises the year's best picture book (published in the US or whatever). The Greenaway recognises the year's best-illustrated book for children or young adults. Books recommended for ages 8+ and even 10+ tend to do well when they do reach the shortlist. The latest winner A Monster Calls is an illustrated novel that we call a "young-adult fantasy novel" in the lead. The librarian-judges gave the recommendation 9+. --P64 (talk) 19:59, 15 July 2012 (UTC)


 * The Newbery and Caldecott Awards: A Guide to the Medal and Honor Books is published annually by the American Library Association.--mainly a reprint, i presume, because each edition covers the entire history.
 * Some introductory chapters of past editions are available online (Web Extra for the current edition) and two of those concern picture books.
 * 2002, as pp 1-4, John Stewig, "Get the Picture?"
 * 2011, pp. 11–17, Barbara Z. Kiefer, "The Art of the Picture Book: Past, Present, and Future"
 * The former is about "how picture books come to be" nowadays and the latter is a history from papyrus scrolls, to the Kings 5 manuscript, and so on, with about two pages on the Caldecott Medal era (U.S. 1937 to date).
 * --P64 (talk) 19:43, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

Merger discussion result
After discussion (on the Children's literature talk page, not here), a consensus was reached to merge Board book into this page.

if any of you want to do the merger you're welcome to. Otherwise I'll probably get to it in a few days. Dan Bloch (talk) 03:32, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

Editing Plans
I am planning to make some changes to this article in the coming weeks. First, I plan to add a section about picture books and pedagogy. There is currently very little in the article about picture books as teaching tools for children. Secondly, I plan to add a genre section that will give more in-depth information about the genre of picture books and its importance. This will include information about the interaction between text and art in picture books. Thirdly, I will reorganize the "early illustrated books," "early to mid-20th century," and "mid-to late 20th century" sections to be subsections under one "history" section. I plan to add citations to parts of the categories and awards sections. These changes will make the article easier to digest and will provide a more comprehensive overview of the broad topic of picture books. Carlyc43 (talk) 14:30, 20 April 2022 (UTC)